README.mkd

Mail

Introduction

Mail is an internet library for Ruby that is designed to handle emails
generation, parsing and sending in a simple, rubyesque manner.

The purpose of this library is to provide a single point of access to handle
all email functions, including sending and receiving emails. All network
type actions are done through proxy methods to Net::SMTP, Net::POP3 etc.

Built from my experience with TMail, it is designed to be a pure ruby
implementation that makes generating, sending and parsing emails a no
brainer.

It is also designed form the ground up to work with Ruby 1.9. This is because
Ruby 1.9 handles text encodings much more magically than Ruby 1.8.x and so
these features have been taken full advantage of in this library allowing
Mail to handle a lot more messages more cleanly than TMail. Mail does run on
Ruby 1.8.x... it's just not as fun to code.

Finally, Mail has been designed with a very simple object oriented system
that really opens up the email messages you are parsing, if you know what
you are doing, you can fiddle with every last bit of your email directly.

Compatibility

Mail is tested and works on the following platforms:

jruby-1.5.2 [ x86_64-java ]

ree-1.8.7-2010.02 [ x86_64 ]

ruby-1.8.6-p399 [ x86_64 ]

ruby-1.8.7-p302 [ x86_64 ]

ruby-1.9.2-p0 [ x86_64 ]

Discussion

If you want to discuss mail with like minded individuals, please subscribe to
the Google Group.

Current Capabilities of Mail

RFC2822 Support, Reading and Writing

RFC2045-2049 Support for multipart emails

Support for creating multipart alternate emails

Support for reading multipart/report emails & getting details from such

Support for multibyte emails - needs quite a lot of work and testing

Wrappers for File, Net/POP3, Net/SMTP

Auto encoding of non US-ASCII header fields

Auto encoding of non US-ASCII bodies

Mail is RFC2822 compliant now, that is, it can parse and generate valid US-ASCII
emails. There are a few obsoleted syntax emails that it will have problems with, but
it also is quite robust, meaning, if it finds something it doesn't understand it will
not crash, instead, it will skip the problem and keep parsing. In the case of a header
it doesn't understand, it will initialise the header as an optional unstructured
field and continue parsing.

This means Mail won't (ever) crunch your data (I think).

You can also create MIME emails. There are helper methods for making a
multipart/alternate email for text/plain and text/html (the most common pair)
and you can manually create any other type of MIME email.

Roadmap

Next TODO:

Improve MIME support for character sets in headers, currently works, mostly, needs
refinement.

Testing Policy

Basically... we do BDD on Mail. No method gets written in Mail without a
corresponding or covering spec. We expect as a minimum 100% coverage
measured by RCov. While this is not perfect by any measure, it is pretty
good. Additionally, all functional tests from TMail are to be passing before
the gem gets released.

It also means you can be sure Mail will behave correctly.

API Policy

No API removals within a single point release. All removals to be depreciated with
warnings for at least one MINOR point release before removal.

Also, all private or protected methods to be declared as such - though this is still I/P.

Installation

Installation is fairly simple, I host mail on rubygems, so you can just do:

# gem install mail

Encodings

If you didn't know, handling encodings in Emails is not as straight forward as you
would hope.

I have tried to simplify it some:

All objects that can render into an email, have an #encoded method. Encoded will
return the object as a complete string ready to send in the mail system, that is,
it will include the header field and value and CRLF at the end and wrapped as
needed.

All objects that can render into an email, have a :decoded method. Decoded will
return the object's "value" only as a string. This means it will not include
the header fields (like 'To:' or 'Subject:').

By default, calling #to_s on a container object will call its encoded
method, while #to_s on a field object will call it's decoded method.
So calling #to_s on a Mail object will return the mail, all encoded
ready to send, while calling #to_s on the From field or the body will
return the decoded value of the object. The header object of Mail is considered a
container. If you are in doubt, call #encoded, or #decoded
explicitly, this is safer if you are not sure.

Structured fields that have parameter values that can be encoded (e.g. Content-Type) will
provide decoded parameter values when you call the parameter names as methods against
the object.

Structured fields that have parameter values that can be encoded (e.g. Content-Type) will
provide encoded parameter values when you call the parameter names through the
object.parameters[''] method call.

Contributing

Please do! Contributing is easy in Mail:

Check the Reference RFCs, they are in the References directory, so no excuses.

Open a ticket on GitHub, maybe someone else has the problem too

Make a fork of my GitHub repository

Make a spec driven change to the code base

Make sure it works and all specs pass, on Ruby versions 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9

Update the README if needed to reflect your change / addition

With all specs passing push your changes back to your fork

Send me a pull request

Usage

All major mail functions should be able to happen from the Mail module.
So, you should be able to just require 'mail' to get started.

Excerpts from TREC Spam Corpus 2005

The spec fixture files in spec/fixtures/emails/from_trec_2005 are from the
2005 TREC Public Spam Corpus. They remain copyrighted under the terms of
that project and license agreement. They are used in this project to verify
and describe the development of this email parser implementation.

"Small excerpts of the information may be displayed to others
or published in a scientific or technical context, solely for
the purpose of describing the research and development and
related issues."
-- http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/treccorpus/

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.